Outline and Guiding Questions:
Why am I interested in Variation Theory?
As I was watching my fellow pre-service teachers’ first attempts at using inquiry, I noticed a pedagogical pattern emerging. Teacher candidates were posing open-ended questions to students and asking them to offer solutions to those problems. In most cases, students answered a single question with a variety of possible explanations that were based on each student’s personal experiences and conceptions of the physical world. For example, one teacher asked “Why do people perceive sounds that are moving towards them as increasing in pitch and sounds that are moving away from them as decreasing in pitch?” The students provided a variety of answers, such as “it’s the way our ears are facing”, “it’s the way sound particles bounce off of one another” and “the speed of the train causes the sound waves in front to bunch up and the waves at the back to stretch out”. Of the many suggestions students posited, only one was correct.
There was nothing inherently wrong with this method; in fact, one student correctly described the Doppler effect that explains this phenomenon. The problem was that the teacher, wanting to encourage classroom participation, rewarded all of the students’ suggestions equally and did not identify the most intelligible answer before moving on to an in depth explanation of the content. As a result, students could not be sure that their method of viewing the problem was sound and applicable to other, similar situations. Essentially, students were not given the opportunity to form, test and reshape their perceptions of the world in a way that is consistent with the dominant theories we, as teachers, are trying to convey. From these observations, I wondered how I could encourage these shifts in perception, without telling students their initial instincts were wrong and discouraging their future participation in classroom discussions. During the semester, I came across two educational theories that I believe could help me achieve this goal.
The first is Conceptual Change Theory, which suggests that teachers, through scaffolding, can change how their students understand different phenomena. They do this by: 1) presenting students with a discrepant event; 2) developing different methods for explaining that event; 3) testing the intelligibility of each method; 4) applying that method to similar events. The Conceptual Change Model offers a broad framework for advancing students’ understanding of different phenomena. Another model—Variation Theory—I believe provides teachers with a concrete strategy for actualizing the Conceptual Change Model in their classrooms.
Variation Theory suggests that students, based on their personal experience, will naturally focus on different aspects of a phenomenon and to help them make sense of that event we need to its critical aspects into view separately. For example, for students to understand the concept of colour, they need to experience at least two different colours, which are two aspects of the same phenomenon. If a student knew only the colour red, then the concept of colour could not exist. It is not until we introduce variation—the colour green for example—that the concept of colour makes sense. Eventually, we can introduce the idea of a colour spectrum by varying the properties of visible light, which in turn we can vary to explain the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum. It seems to me that Variation Theory and Conceptual Change Theory share similar fundamental principles that can help deepen students’ understanding of different phenomena and so, my inquiry question is: Can we use Variation Theory to promote conceptual change in our classrooms?
Why is my question significant?
I believe that my inquiry question is significant because in answering it I will effectively meld two educational theories into a single tangible framework that teachers can use to deepen students’ understandings of any phenomenon. Note that this framework has unlimited potential for use in courses outside of the physical sciences as well. For example, we cannot understand the concept of languages if we only speak English. However, once we compare English to French we can understand that English exists as part of a system of languages with some shared and some unique attributes.
What resources did I draw on to explore my question?
As my inquiry question develops two different educational theories, I will rely heavily on journal articles and textbooks dedicated to the exploration of each theory. Importantly, I will focus on the work of Ference Marton and Shelly Booth (learning and awareness), who developed Phenomenography, of which Variation Theory is an offshoot. I will also study the work of Peter and Mariana Hewson, who developed the idea of conceptual change in education. Lo Mun Ling’s textbook on the implementation of Variation Theory will also be an invaluable resource during my exploration of Conceptual Change and Variation Theory. I will also reference the work of Cedric Linder and Ming Pang.
What do I expect to find out?
As I discuss above, I hope to develop a framework that uses Variation Theory to promote conceptual change in classrooms. I intend for my framework to be accessible to all teachers, regardless of their subject focus. I also believe that I will be able to construct a pedagogy that allows students to learn academic concepts more efficiently.